NYFF 64: Austria’s “Rose” is much more than merely another Sandra Hüller showcase

by Cláudio Alves

While our TIFF 51 coverage isn’t over – sometimes, it feels like it will go on forever, with Eurocheese and I falling into Sisyphus' fate – one must acknowledge the other big festival of the moment. Right now, the New York Film Festival is blessing audiences with some of the best in world cinema, from September 25 to October 12. As we’ve done in years past, Joanna Sodeman-Taylor will join me in covering the fest from a distance, relying on screeners and whatnot. Hope you enjoy this wild virtual ride.

To kickstart these NYFF musings, why not consider another Best International Oscar submission? This one’s from Austria and last Berlinale’s Best Leading Performance Silver Bear winner, Rose. Indeed, most of the chatter about Markus Schleinzer’s latest has focused on Sandra Hüller’s work, a tour de force at the heart of a film that, nevertheless, is much more complicated than a mere acting showcase. Set in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, Rose is a story assembled from various cases documented in legal archives of the time, about those who were born as women to society’s eyes yet assumed male identities to liberate themselves from the limits of their sex. In the 17th century and beyond, there were and there are many Roses…

Though he won’t always be able or even want to outrun comparisons to his past creative collaborator, Schleinzer starts Rose as far away from Haneke as he could get without betraying the essential severity of his vision. The image we’re met with is rendered in a black-and-white some might associate with The White Ribbon, but its nature is not as derivative as it could be, being of a distinct poetic desolation. You have to contemplate the sight for a while before even starting to discern what’s on screen, a landscape of burned and still burning earth, smoke and vapor seeping from the restless grounds that were recently a battlefield and, now, are probably closer to a mass grave. It’s the post-war. It’s no man’s land. It’s the apocalypse. 

Bones come later, their gender impossible to define. For us, as an audience getting just a glimpse of two collections of calcium and desiccated collagen that were once people, but also for modern specialists who, no matter what reactionaries say online, cannot determine the sex of such findings, much less their gender. Nothing has happened, yet such ideas already percolate through Rose. And that’s before masked people come into the scene, folkloric costume making merriment out of sorrow, a pagan pandemonium to give life back to a screen that had, until then, been a window into death and nothing but.

The world invoked by Schleinzer, DP Gerald Kerkletz, production designer Olivier Meidinger, and costumer Doris Bartelt feels both familiar and alien. It’s the historical past recreated, visceral in its materiality yet alienating in its adherence to specific period oddities and the potential for a theatrical anachronism, here and there. Through it, walks our protagonist, limping, disfigured, dressed as a soldier. Slowly, the wasteland gives way to a village, to a house, everything frozen in the depths of winter, with bears encroaching upon settled territory, threatening beastly violence against those who seek to live in this unforgiving place. 

A place that the soldier means to reclaim as his home. Narration reveals the truth before image can, before performance has evidenced it, but this is not a prodigal son returning to reclaim a rightful inheritance. They're Rose, who internally still identifies as a woman, and who was a soldier, now taking from a former brother in arms who died beside her on the battlefield. As the seasons pass, the community accepts its returning son, who, after all, has proven himself a capable farmer and a man of arms who’ll defend his property and the people under his care. Matrimony is inevitable, a business transaction like any other. Or is it?

Schleinzer shoots it that way, a studied mise-en-scène that presents choosing a wife from a neighbor’s cadre of daughters as a theatrical piece in which only our protagonist seems unsure of what their performance entails. The wedding itself is like a play, costumed in blinding white and filigreed gold. It has to be so, or else we might lose sight of the newlyweds in the black-clad crowd as everything is shot at a sniper’s distance, the church and its people feeling small and secondary to the land. Hüller is incredible throughout, playing a pragmatist in ways that are aligned with the projection of masculinity on display as opportunism, perchance survival, or liberation.

Of all the tonal registers you’d expect from a movie on this topic, one that looks so much like a desaturated Bruegel, marital comedy wasn’t one of them. Yet, Rose surprises with the awkward negotiation of a new reality at the farm, husbandly duties performed through strapped-on subterfuge, illusions kept by shadows and the enforcement of a wife’s expected obedience. When, by miracle, a pregnancy comes to be, it’s difficult to begrudge Rose’s spouse and her misadventures. Especially when, holding a newborn as full of life as the land in Spring, sex and gendered constructs and the lies they demand seem secondary to the strange joys our hero lets illuminate their face.

Truth has a way of coming out, however. Or as close to the truth as a 17th-century peasant might comprehend. Even for a 21st-century viewer, all that goes on inside Rose isn’t obvious. It might even be a mystery to the character, and to those they represent from history’s bloodstained pages. Whatever the case, paranoia settles in, a rope of anxiety twisting itself tighter and tighter, tension building up. At the same time, a new understanding flourishes between the couple, shifting the narrative into a story of equals meeting in the middle of an unresolvable situation. If possible, Caro Braun’s performance impresses as much as Hüller’s and takes you by surprise even more so than the great thespian does. 

For a while, their happy ending seems in reach. Perversely, it’s sustained by appealing to social hierarchies and norms, the very forces that, if their secrets were made public, would destroy the couple, their family, their everything. Oppression can be a useful tool for the oppressed, too, privileges manifesting in ways that allow those who suffer being stepped on by higher powers to step on those below themselves. It doesn’t last, though. Not because Schleinzer is taking pleasure in queer misery, but because Rose is more than a character study. In fact, it’s closer to a reflection on Germanic societies’ adherence to rules, man-made orders that serve as justification for violence.

Orders that are often incompatible with the most essential facts of the human condition and which have led to atrocities across time. Not just the horrors perpetrated on the Roses of the 17th through the 19th centuries. Not even just the madness of WWI, followed by another, and the horrors of the Holocaust. By looking at the past, Rose tells us about our present, asking us to regard it critically and recognize patterns repeating themselves. It’s a conversation directed mostly at a Germanic tradition, though it probably applies to most of the so-called West, where freedom and the value of life seem invalid unless they are understood within the law, the system. But what if the system is wrong? It matters not, for order must prevail. Submit, the system demands. 

A strange sort of kindness emerges from formal and textual severity in Rose, preventing the film’s last acts from becoming spectacles of mortification. Hüller is Falconetti on trial by Dreyer, and the images on display leave no doubt that The Passion of Joan of Arc was a reference to everyone involved, from costume makers to performers, Schleinzer himself. And as the powers that be try to silence Rose, that narration whose necessity some might have questioned earlier in the film finally reveals its purpose. Voice is given to those condemned to be voiceless, their pleas unheard, their memory erased, an entire existence forgotten. To spell out a thesis feels vulgar, yet Rose almost demands one articulate it.

That we are not of God, be it divinity or the concept of a nation, but of ourselves. In self-possession, one must recognize that the impossible is the product of convention being accepted as the only way to live rather than the prison it tends to be. Write your own story, invent yourself as you are within rather than what forces from without demand you be. Don’t accept the reality others decide for you. If the church, the state, the systems of war and power, insist that our bodies belong to them, at least our stories shall be ours alone. Shackled and bound, Hüller still makes you believe this truth. You feel it in your bones, in your marrow. It’s freeing despite the tragedy of freedom denied, a paradox that Rose can unravel on the big screen, as it bids us adieu.

Rose is playing as part of the Main Slate of the NYFF 64. On December 11, it will begin its limited theatrical release, before dropping on MUBI at a yet undisclosed date.